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This afternoon’s glorious freelance waste of time was debugging a server’s PHP installation which got broken with a experimental installation of iRedMail — do NOT install iRedMail on a production machine, it’s meant for fresh installs only.

Lots of people quote CS Lewis, perhaps not knowing where he actually comes from or what he actually means. A Northern Irish boy, raised in East Belfast, he struggled through early faith journey eventually becoming an atheist before heading to Oxford. That’s not where the story ended. I saw the below quote tweeted in a positive life affirming sense (I imagine,) when in reality Lewis was overtly and unapologetically Christian in his writings after conversion.

“There are far better things ahead than any we leave behind”

Alister McGrath (Oxford educated scientist, resident theologian, and author of far too many books) spoke today at a pair of events hosted by the QUB Chaplaincies at The Hub on Elmwood Avenue. Below are two recordings provided by The Hub team of the talks.

The former might be described as building the framework behind why we believe, touching on a little of how Lewis was a “travelling companion” to McGrath in his journey into faith; the latter is a broad overview of Lewis, his influences (including how the Northern Irish landscape influenced Narnia) and legacy of thought.

I’ve been making some changes to a site which already uses the ezPDF class for creating PDFs from PHP. How to insert a link?

Helper methods seem to exist but they are not documented in the code and are a bit confusing to read. Instead, you can just embed a hyperlink into any (I think) text entry and it’ll be converted into a clickable link. Use the syntax below.

The task: create a click tracker, to keep a rough (accuracy isn’t of core importance, but why skimp?) measure of the number of time s a link has been clicked by site users.

Here’s some sample code I used for the new version of GiantsLive which contains a digital downloads feature.

The task is a fairly simple one, it doesn’t even require a controller, but here we use a migration to create a stats table, and a model to provide a simple API.

The ‘object_key’ I’ve used refers to an AmazonS3 object’s unique name (within a bucket), this is because each ‘fixture’ has several video files available to download.

Migration

Model

Usage

You could create a helper method to present the detail neatly, but that’s up to you. Hope that code is helpful, if you have any suggestions on how to clean it up any further do use the comments below.

Part 2: Turbolinks causing 403 problems

Or maybe just one. Rails 4.0 introduces a new feature called https://github.com/rails/turbolinks/ which is intended to reduce the amount of server requests caused by a page change, in very simple terms it means that instead of looking for CSS, JS and font files every time you click a link, it just asks for the HTML + images. I was getting a strange quirk in my tracking code whereby every click was creating two increment actions. I finally figured out the problem by looking my logs. An excerpt here:

You’ll notice the “Complete 403 Forbidden” first, then “Completed 302 Found” second. Turbolinks appears to have been requesting the file, failing and then resorting to a page reload. This caused the tracker to be triggered twice, and the statistics to be incorrect.

The new album ‘I am Mountain’ is on its way, American Songwriter have a preview of a track. Sounding like a background hum from the set of Justified, it has a moody southern blues feel. While the track is supposedly set apart from the rest of the album, it paves a welcome path.

Young Peter has been making the most of his (not so) new (anymore) job and this week got to take a group of young people around the Belfast Telegraph building on Royal Avenue, Belfast. He’s taken some great behind the scenes shots which you can see on his blog.

The simple site has two aspects: professional and academic. It’s somewhat adaptive (but perhaps not quite ‘responsive’?), has been developed to accommodate video content on each page if a video BSL interpretation is available and in future will allow Sally to receive feedback on various research projects.

Sally is a BSL/English interpreter and a first year PhD translation student. Through her research, she is exploring the demographics of the deaf signing population in Northern Ireland and the resources and opportunities available to this linguistic minority.

She adopts a balanced approach to practice and research, and is currently organising an academic conference on Sign Language and the Politics of Recognition in addition to her studies and interpreting work.